


Morning Ritual

by fandomfan



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Ficlet, Fluff, M/M, Post-Series, Pre-Series, Saccharine sweetness to the point of ill health, Smol!James wears Tol!Thomas's shirts, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Truest Loves, Tumblr Prompt, did i mention the fluff?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-17 11:44:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12365055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandomfan/pseuds/fandomfan
Summary: James wears Thomas's shirts, which are too big for him, but he hardly minds.





	Morning Ritual

**Author's Note:**

> [bean-about-townn](http://bean-about-townn.tumblr.com) posted
>
>> guys. u don’t understand i need more flinthamilton height difference fics. james flint mcgraw, the tiniest tiny spoon there ever was or will be, even after the reunion - especially after the reunion. thomas kissing the top of james’ head. james ‘borrowing’ thomas’ shirts for the first time after the reunion and being so happy they still make him look smol  
> 
> 
>   
> And this is what came into my head. 

Mornings like this are James’s greatest private pleasure.  The early light streaks wan and grey through the window, and the sound of rain spattering the panes gives James all the excuse he needs to turn back to Thomas, asleep and golden in nothing but his skin under the tumbled sheets.  It is early yet, and Thomas is a cosseted nobleman who is rarely required to rise before mid-morning.  He never learned the knack of it, he says, and when James—an early riser by habit and Naval training both—awakes at dayspring, he can indulge as he is now.  He can watch Thomas sleep.

Thomas fucks with a dedication of focus and an extremity of passion matched only by his argumentative fervor, a thought that amuses James to no end when he watches Thomas debating ideas at his salons, knowing in a way only Miranda shares that the flush to Thomas’s cheek and the quickening of his breath look exactly like Thomas with his head between one’s thighs.  When he is spent after an evening in bed, Thomas sleeps like dropping an anchor into still water.  So when James leaves the bed in the gentle early hours, Thomas does not wake.  It frees James to accomplish his preferred morning ritual.  

Required are merely two things: the enormous armchair by the window and whatever shirt Thomas discarded the night before.

James dons the shirt, which surrounds him in snowy white linen that smells like Thomas.  Though their heights are not vastly different, Thomas’s shirts make James feel that difference keenly.  The cuffs tumble over his fingers.  The slits at the neck fall open practically to his navel.  The hems nearly reach his knees.  James curls himself into the high-backed armchair, cocooned in it and in Thomas’s finely-woven shirt, and he feels safe from the demands of a world against which he must always be on guard.

He watches over Thomas’s loose and easy sleep, and allows his love-drowned heart to have command of him in this secret, quiet, little world of his own.

When Thomas eventually wakes, James will return to his bed and another secluded world that brings him a great deal of pleasure.  But for now, he is happy to inhabit his safe, solitary cloister of private devotion.

 

{}{}{}

 

Thomas will be forever grateful that he is once again able to wake easily and slowly after so long where that was not possible.

In their bedroom in the little house he and James now share—something else for which he will be forever grateful—they have a wide bed of their own in which Thomas feels as content and secure as anywhere he has slept in his life.

It is no easy thing to have come to this after the trials he and James have undergone.  Their years apart and all that befell them certainly cost dear.  And the work they have accomplished to come back together again with that added decade of rough life between them has taken no small amount of effort, either.

But the cost has been paid, and the effort has been made.  Thomas has his James again.  He will _never_  cease to feel a gratitude so immense he can hardly 'compass it to have James eating and talking and living and sleeping beside him each day.

Except for this particular moment, as James is not, to Thomas's sulky discontent, beside him in bed to provide the warm skin and morning kisses with which Thomas prefers to start his days.  He grumbles and opens sleep-bleared eyes in search of his missing lover.

"Awake at last," James says from the chair by the window.  The fondness audible in his voice smoothes away Thomas's disgruntlement.  The sight of him clears it entirely.  James had sought out that enormous armchair with purpose and then cleverly restored and reupholstered it with devoted attention.  He now sits in it, swaddled by its high back and plush arms and wearing Thomas's shirt from yesterday.  While his linen isn't nearly as fine as it was in younger days, the shirt is still of good quality, and it drapes softly around James, overlong on him as Thomas's shirts always are.

It feels good and right to see James this way.

"Do you remember when you used to do this in London?" Thomas asks, recent sleep rough in his voice.  He waves one hand to take in James in his shirt, in the chair.

"It was one of my favourite ways to begin a day," James replies with a soft smile.

Thomas rolls up to his elbow and says, "Mine, too.  Did you know that?"

"I did not," James says.  "In point of fact, I'd not realized you noticed it."

"Well I did.  I loved waking up to see you in my bedroom, in my chair, in my shirt, looking so surrounded.  It made you seem so comprehensively mine."

James smiles wider now, his soft, small look blossoming into an expression of such devoted tenderness that Thomas cannot help but mirror it back on his own face.

"I _am_ comprehensively yours," James says, unfolding himself from the chair.  He takes a step back toward the bed.

"I am absolutely yours," he goes on, advancing again.

"Devotedly."  He achieves the edge of the bed.  Thomas curves a hand round the back of one strong thigh.

"Utterly."  He pulls Thomas's shirt off and drops it to the floor.  Naked, the man is just as glorious a sight as ever.

"Besottedly."  He climbs under the sheets to lie close, all his warm skin offered to Thomas's skin.

"And forever."  He closes the space between them with a kiss.

Thomas rolls him underneath, heart singing from his chest.  "And forever," he returns, glad and grateful with every last drop he has in him.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr [here](http://fand0mfan.tumblr.com/post/166407148919/bean-about-townn-guys-u-dont-understand-i-need). Come find me over there where we can grab hands and jump up and down about pirates who have Feelings.


End file.
